Mental health and mental fitness
A different way of looking at things
Until now, I’ve always thought about mental health as the absence of mental illness, much as I have typically thought about the absence of physical illness. In both cases, health is the default state or unmarked category.
But as I have gone through the Covid pandemic, and become more pessimistic about the state of the world, I have reached the view that a better analogy is with physical fitness. That is, something that requires sustained effort to achieve and maintain, and is rarely fully achieved.
In particular while I have previously thought about depression as a mental illness, it's difficult now to distinguish it from ordinary sadness. My congenital optimism now seems more like delusion. Maintaining mental balance is now hard work.
Not surprisingly, I’m not the first to come up with this idea. Searching for “mental fitness” produces lots of hits, mostly fairly recent. The majority are boosterish, introducing and promoting the idea, rather than acknowledging the difficulties associated with it. Nevertheless, I’m hoping to get some useful suggestions. I’d be interested in readers thoughts.
PS: illustrating one of the difficulties of maintaining physical fitness, I came off my bike the other day and broke my wrist. So I’m attempting to blog by dictation. It’s a challenging mental exercise.
I wonder how much reducing use of Twitter would improve mental fitness? The roiling recriminations and resentments of Twitter can't be good for our mental fitness. In the last 15 years we have seen a large increase in psychological distress and anxiety - especially among younger people. I wonder how much of that is due to the way we consume information and the type of information we consume.
For some time, I've come to the conclusion that mental fitness is a far more productive and helpful way of viewing the benefits of positive thinking. Being physically fit didn't prevent the bad luck of falling off your bike; positive thinking doesn't mean only good things will happen.
Of course, there's mental fitness in the sense of being "smart", and then in the sense of being happy (enough).